Freud had already shown in London and Paris when he came to Dublin in 1948 [most likely when Swift and Freud first met], partly on a pilgrimage to Jack B Yeats, who had just enjoyed a retrospective at the Tate; and whom Freud declared the greatest living painter… Freud seemed closest to artist Paddy Swift…In September 1951 Kitty Garman wrote to her mother…She mentions Freud working on a painting in Paddy Swift’s Hatch Street studio, Dead Cock’s Head 1951, painted on the same red velvet chair as Swift’s Woodcock 1951. Anthony Cronin recalls the two men painting side-by-side when he stayed in Hatch Street c.1950, Freud more obsessed by surface and detail than Swift.— Mic Moroney, 'Lucian Freud: Prophet of Discomfort', Irish Arts Review, 2007

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It is generally accepted that the great influence on Swift was Lucian Freud... In fact, for many years after he left Dublin, he was remembered mainly as Freud's leading Irish follower. This was almost inevitable, given that his first and only exhibition was notably Freudian and that Freud's reputation was so high at the time (it went into temporary eclipse later, under the abstract domination which lasted for perhaps a decade). But though the influence is plain to see, there are big temperamental and even stylistic differences between the two men; Swift probably would have painted very much as he did if he had never seen a Freud canvas. They shared a common Zeitgeist, but their emotional worlds were not the same, in spite of the rather tense, spare, more-real-than-real quality which they have in common. Freud works, or at least worked then, in predominantly pale colours, with a strong, wiry outline learned partly from Picasso and Leger, partly from painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in Germany. His work was artfully flat, with a minimum of modelling or relief, and usually achieved with characteristically thin paint. Swift, in such works as the 1951 self-portrait, was generally darker in tone, less mannered, more inclined to give both figures and objects a place in space, and to model in light and shadow.
What they shared was the ability to give ordinary objects an aura of tension and strangeness, a quality noticed by the Irish Times art critic 'GHG' (Tony Gray) when he reviewed the Waddington exhibition.— Brian Fallon, taken from his essay 'Patrick Swift and Irish Art' (1993), Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001; first published: 'Patrick Swift and Irish Art', Portfolio 2 - Modern Irish Arts Review, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1993

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By the mid-1940s, after spells at various art schools and a stint as a merchant seaman during the second world war, Freud had become part of the bohemian Soho-based milieu of artists and intellectuals who included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Ron Kitaj and the Irish painter and writer Patrick Swift, who published some of Freud’s early works in his cultural review X Magazine.— Rachel Spence, Financial Times, July 21, 2011

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He worked quite closely for a time with Patrick Swift and with Edward McGuire. The mutual influence is evident in the work of all three men.
There are early Swift drawings that are close in style and intimacy to Freud's haunting portraits and self-portraits from that time.... The impact at the time, in both Dublin and Connemara, was reinforced by the White Stag painters and there has been little examination of this in study of Freud, in part because the richness of that period in Dublin has only recently been rediscovered.
Lucian Freud himself is obsessively interested in those early works and seeks to recover those that are still to be found. — The Irish Independent, Bruce Arnold, Saturday June 23 2007

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Another transition and still no attempt at chronology: to Hatch Street, to the ground-floor and basement flat which John Ryan had spent the early months of his marriage. I have the front room, almost bare of furniture except for the large portrait of myself by Swift over the mantelpiece and some books. The other room on the hall floor is Paddy's studio…. In the morning the sun comes through the high white window of my room, but before I am up I can hear Paddy, who is already at his easel, through the folding doors which divide the two rooms.
Lucian Freud, who is staying in Dublin, comes to paint for some weeks also...
He has had a show in Waddington’s in Dublin, a big success, but he has moved to London. When, one day (which may have been later on), Lucian Freud asks me if he is going to show in the new London Waddington’s, I answer that I did not think so, that I do not think he is interested in exhibiting his paintings. We are both puzzled. If I was trying to write that kind of piece I would try and analyse Paddy’s attitude to success, so pure and ascetic from one aspect, but also so in love with a certain idea of it. In a way he does not need to be a success, he has always been one, and people sense this about him immediately...— Anthony Cronin, Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993

He had met Freud by 1949... My grasp of chronology is not always accurate, but certainly the acquaintance was well-developed by 1950 when we shared the ground-floor of a house in Hatch Street together. Lucian, who was staying in Ireland, used to come around in the mornings to paint, so that sometimes when I would surface around ten or eleven I would find them both at work in the studio next door...
There is in both painters an intensity which may at first not seem justified by the actual subject matter, a sense of life as always, even in its banalities, perhaps especially in those, verging on horror and partaking of tragedy, something which overtly surrealist painting often aims at and misses... But beyond a certain point influence is really no more than an indication of possibility; and some of the differences were apparent to me even then. He is for example less concerned with surface and texture than Freud was at that point and less obsessional in his painting of it...— Anthony Cronin, Patrick Swift IMMA Retrospective Catalogue, 1993

This site is a tribute to the painter Patrick Swift. Images displayed on this site are not a chosen selection to represent his body of work. He was a prolific artist and the images found here are only a sample of his output. This is not an official site. For further information about Swift contact Porches Pottery.